Mind and body are not separate nor is body for real and mind a mere epiphenomenon. The body is concrete, objective stuff but mind is a set of relationships with both concrete and abstract being.
During recent weeks, I picked up links to various articles which reaffirm our embodied natures. From our bodies of physical stuff, we think to look out into a world but we don’t even truly see it unless we engage in active exploration, unless we actively respond to what we find out there. It’s a boom field, this business of exploring our embodied natures. We can learn from studies that tell us How Touch and Movement Contribute to the Development of the Brain. But the well-formed brain itself makes it possible to develop the skills that allow us to continue our exploration of our environments. It must be so, there a scientific study telling us that Big, Little, Tall and Tiny: Learning Spatial Terms Improves Children’s Spatial Skills. And it likely is true, though the researchers might have gotten some things wrong, because it is consistent with the body of modern knowledge about human nature, knowledge so consistent with the teachings of that Medieval man, St. Thomas Aquinas. Man is an organism. Man intends in a true sense when he is developing as an organism in a properly willed, properly thought-out, way.
Little of this new knowledge should be truly surprising to those who are self-aware, who have deeply experienced and come to know the way that a simple cold can distort perceptions and thoughts and fundamental attitudes. Many in this therapeutic age might be more surprised to learn that Training in ‘Concrete Thinking’ Can Be Self-Help Treatment for Depression, Study Suggests. Learning how to deal with this thing-ish world can cure depression. Anchor yourself. The world can be nasty but those who deal with this world as it is can think straight and not have their thinking distorted in a way we’d label as ‘depressed’. There was recently a discovery I’d mentioned in an earlier entry that the physical problems, including posture problems, of bipolar disease — a truly nasty psychiatric disorder — develop years before those psychiatric problems. No one knows quite what that means yet, but it’s hardly surprising to learn that changing our posture can affect how we feel and how our brains work: Mind-Body Mindblower: Posture Affects Estimates. Sit up straight, just as your Grannie told you to do.
I suspect that a very interesting study might be done on the relationship between psychiatric disorders and various disorders of the propriocentric systems of human beings.
Are snakes nasty partly because they crawl through the dust? Were they selected over the ages for such an embodiment because they were a line of particularly nasty reptiles? As I recall from reading Lord of the Rings decades ago, noble creatures had noble postures and noble ways of moving through the world. Gollum was a crouching and slouching creature and the orcs moved as if stomping life out with every heavy-booted tread. I’m not a big fan of fantasy but Tolkien seems to have had good insight into some moral issues.
Were Lord Byron’s mental and emotional problems increased by his club-foot? (He was descended from a line of the Gordons which had a terrible problem with male-only bipolar disorder. I’m descended from a different line of the Gordons but there seems to be a certain amount of alcoholism and depression, male and female, in my family line.)
Should we be teaching children how to stand properly and how to move properly? Should all young humans be taught to stand tall, proud in the proper way?
I myself am coming out of a short period of writer’s block which followed an intense 3-week volunteer project in my parish — the last week was the period of no electricity and no heat in my part of New England. I think my histamine levels sky-rocketed, perhaps partly because of damage to my tendons and general exhaustion and so forth. My arms often throbbed with what I suspect was a healing process. My mood was often dark, a sort of paranoia I often suffer when I have tendinitis or a cold or sinus infection or any other disorder which plays with histamine levels. During that dusky, though not truly dark, period, was I slouching? Was I looking at damaged trees and the blue skies of an abnormally mild November from a bad angle?
I am embodied but that doesn’t mean that my body enslaves me. It doesn’t mean this thing-like world enslaves me. Somehow, I’ve a small bit of moral freedom, mostly in the future, but that future nature of my freedom allows me to leverage that freedom. I can learn the ways in which I’m constrained, sometimes to the edge of slavery. I can move a fraction of an inch to the side to slip out of those constraints over the next few years. I can maneuver around the traps and snake-pits.
Why is the world as it is? Why did God create a world with so many problems, so much pain and suffering, so much death?
Perhaps we gain our freedom, a proper creaturely freedom, by learning how to look to our future self, to choose to be a better self, healthier in body and mind, healthier in our relationships to our own selves and to our human communities and to our world. Perhaps this active self which seeks its own true good and the good of all those around it is the dynamic self which can be happy living in community with the saints and with God? Perhaps we can learn how to be God-like by learning how to properly stand and move and how to properly look at the world and think about it?